Semantic Web Activity Statement

October 2013 Work conducted under the Semantic Web Activity
has ended or is now nearing the end of its charter. See the highlights section for
the current situation.

The goal of the Semantic Web initiative is as broad as that of the Web: to create
a universal medium for the exchange of data. It is envisaged to smoothly
interconnect personal information management, enterprise application integration,
and the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. Facilities to
put machine-understandable data on the Web are quickly becoming a high priority
for many organizations, individuals and communities.

The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be
shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to
scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these
programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web Activity is an
initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) designed to provide a leadership
role in defining this Web. The Activity develops open specifications for those
technologies that are ready for large scale deployment, and identifies, through
open source advanced development, the infrastructure components that will be
necessary to scale in the Web in the future.

The principal technologies of the Semantic Web fit into a set of layered
specifications. The current components are the Resource Description Framework
(RDF) Core Model, the RDF Schema language, the Web Ontology language (OWL), and
the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). Building on these core components
is a standardized query language, SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle"), enabling querying
decentralized collections of RDF data. The POWDER recommendations provide
technologies to find resource descriptions for specific resources on the Web;
descriptions which can be “joined” to other RDF data. The GRDDL and RDFa
Recommendations aim at creating bridges between the RDF model and various XML
formats, like XHTML. RDFa also plays an important role as a format to add
Structured Data to HTML, i.e., as a means to help using Linked Data in Web
Applications. The goal of the R2RML language is to provide standard language to
map relational data and relational database schemas to RDF and OWL. Finally, the
goal of the newly proposed Linked Data Profile Working Group is to provide a
“entry level” layer to manage Linked Data file using RESTful, HTTP based API.

JSON-LD Syntax 1.0 was published as a Candidate
Recommendation in September 2013 and has just moved to Proposed Recommendation. The standard
was originally developed by a separate JSON
for Linking Data Community Group and has now been incorporated into the
Recommendation track document of the RDF Working Group (JSON-based serialization
of RDF is part of the group’s charter). Last Call Working drafts have also
published for TriG and N-Triples and
N-Quads.

The RDFa Working Group
has successfully taken HTML+RDFa 1.1
to Recommendation and is now dormant pending the completion of HTML5 and RDF 1.1 that may trigger an edited Recommendation.

The Web Schemas Task
Force, under the control of the Semantic
Web Interest Group, continues its activity; it has become the
major public discussion forum for the evolution of schema.org vocabularies, and we
envisage keeping this task force open for the coming period. The proposed Data Activity assigns Team resources
to this group to support the development of vocabularies at W3C (see below.